Showing results by author "Margaret Thornton" in All Categories

August, 1955. Janice Butler is working as a waitress at her mother’s Blackpool boardinghouse before she heads off to university. When Val and Cissie, both from Walker’s woollen mill in Halifax, come to stay for a week, the three young women form an instant friendship. They attend a local dance at the Winter Gardens, which changes all their lives, both for better and for worse.

1960. Having been friends ever since they met in a Blackpool boardinghouse five years before, Val, Cissie and Janice are all now happily married, preoccupied with their growing families. But the new decade will bring change for all. Val and Sam's son's behaviour is causing concern, and Val finds it hard at times to love him as she should. Running a thriving café in Harrogate, Janice and her husband, Phil, decide to expand into the restaurant business: have they bitten off more than they can chew? Meanwhile Cissie's life is thrown into jeopardy when she encounters an old flame....

Eighteen-year-old Debbie Hargreaves is heading to college in Leeds, where she'll be sharing digs with three girls. Debbie soon becomes firm friends with shy Lisa, outspoken Karen and self-assured Fran. Over the coming months, the four flatmates will share tears and laughter and the drama of a new romance. At the same time, Debbie's birth mother, Fiona Norwood, is struggling to cope with four young children and her duties as a rector's wife.

1957. Newly-wed Val Walker is looking forward to starting a family. Her best friend, the previously flighty Cissie, is expecting her second child, content to settle down to full-time motherhood. Their mutual friend Janice is engaged to boyfriend Paul. But life doesn't always turn out as one would expect. Val doesn't find it as easy as she'd expected to fall pregnant. Cissie is jealous when her husband, Walter, takes an interest in a new female colleague. Janice feels guilty for leaving her widowed father and young brother behind in Blackpool to start a new life in Yorkshire.

Happily married to the Reverend Simon Norwood, Fiona Norwood's happiness should be complete. But Fiona has a secret in her past, and she can never forget the baby girl she gave away at birth. Meanwhile, Debbie Hargreaves has known since she was a little girl that she was adopted. Her parents are kind and loving and she has a happy home life. Despite that, once she reaches her teenage years, Debbie determines to find out about her birth mother. But is the past sometimes best left alone?

Having been recently widowed in her 40s, shy Jane Redfern finally plucks up the courage to go on holiday alone. Embarking on a 10-day coach trip to Germany, the last thing she anticipates is to meet someone new and fall in love. But gradually she finds herself drawn to a fellow passenger, Shropshire farmer Dave Falconer, who has also lost his partner. In the stunning Black Forest, her friendship with Dave looks set to blossom. But riddled with guilt at having to leave her cantankerous 85-year-old mother in a retirement home, Jane finds it impossible to imagine a new life with someone else. And there’s something Dave hasn’t been telling her....

Helen Gibbs, a British journalist on assignment on the West Coast of Mexico, meets Christopher Delavaux, an intriguing half-French, half-American lawyer-turned-financier, who has come alone to surf. Living lives that never stop moving, from their first encounter in Bermeja to marriage in London and travels to such places as Saint-Tropez, Tangier, and Santa Clara, Helen and Christopher must decide how much they exist for themselves and how much they exist for each other.

1990, Blackpool. Thirty-three-year-old Helen Burnside is shocked when she learns that her beloved Great Aunt Alice has died of a sudden heart attack, and even more surprised when she is bequeathed her Yorkshire cottage. Although they were close, Alice was an enigmatic figure, estranged from most of her family. What led to the long-held animosity between Alice, her mother, Ada and her sister, Lizzie, and why did she leave Blackpool for Yorkshire all those years ago?

When Eliza Poinsett left the elegant world of Charleston for college, she never expected it would take her 10 years to return. Now almost a decade later, she is an art historian in London with a charming Etonian boyfriend who adores her. But the past catches up with her when she runs into Henry, her childhood love, at a wedding in the English countryside.